Welcome to the first chapter of the Autobat Industries Lab journey.

Before diving into cloud labs, services, and blueprints, it’s worth sharing how this website itself was built — because the way it’s built reflects the same philosophy that guides the Lab: learn by doing, and build with purpose.

When I set out to create this site, I had a few clear goals:

  • Learn without wasting resources: I didn’t want to pay to run a headless CMS 24/7 on AWS to serve static content. Static-first was the right choice — dynamic content could come later, if needed — keeping cost, complexity, and maintenance low.
  • Practice front-end development: My day-to-day work focuses on cloud engineering and architecture. I don’t often get to work on the front end, so this was an opportunity to learn the tools again — to build out user-facing components and understand modern tooling from the ground up.
  • Use Next.js for the framework: I have some experience with Next.js from previous client projects. It offers the right blend of static site generation (SSG), server-side rendering (SSR), and easy API integrations - perfect for a modern, scalable, lightweight website.
  • Explore new tooling: In past projects, I had successfully used StrapiCMS and liked its developer experience. But for this site, I wanted to try something different. After some research and experimentation, I landed on PayloadCMS — a newer headless CMS focused on extensibility, simplicity, and self-hosting flexibility. It allowed me to explore a different content management model, and build new patterns into the platform.




This site is the result of those choices:
Built with Next.js, connected to PayloadCMS, and deployed in a way that scales up only when needed.

The same principles apply throughout the Lab:
Practical, secure, efficient, and designed to grow as needs change.